Click here to read about an introduction to memoir: Journey through Memoir: Introduction .
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I don't know how young I was when Mom and Dad decided to have the back porch torn down. I know it was before I was ten years old. I turned ten in 1969, the year Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I watched him take those first moon steps on the big console TV which sat in the new family room, the one built where the back porch had been before it was demolished. It seems Armstrong was upside down, and I bent over and looked between my legs to see him right side up. Of course we only had black and white on the T.V.
Our house was built on a hill that sloped down toward the back of the house. The back porch had been screened in and built on stilts or columns; I'm pretty sure it was stilts. It seems that Mom used to raise parakeets on the back porch. I faintly recall lots of newspaper that would catch the bird droppings. Or maybe I was told that story often enough, that I painted a mental picture of it. A door went from the kitchen onto the porch. When the demolition took place, one could open the kitchen door into mid-air.
The back porch disappeared and the new family room appeared. Prior to that, the family room had been a small room toward the front of the house. That old family room became my sister's new bedroom; she moved from upstairs to downstairs. After my sister, who was the oldest of the three children, moved downstairs, I moved out of the big upstairs bedroom my older brother and I shared and into what had been my sister's small upstairs bedroom. I think I moved into that small bedroom when I was six or seven?
Ahh, the back porch must have been torn down around that same time, perhaps 1965 or 1966? The big bedroom my brother and I had shared was where the big walk-in cedar closet is located. I wonder if he used to tease me and tell me monster stories about that closet? I must ask my siblings at Christmastime this year about these detail snippets.
It was in my new bedroom, my sister's old bedroom, that I used to surround myself with stuffed animals when I'd jump in bed at night. The animals could protect me in case someone climbed up the giant tree in the back, hopped onto the flat roof that covered the newly constructed family room, and climbed through my bedroom window to shoot me. I slept with a bottle too. I don't know how old I was when I gave up my baby bottle, but it was sometime in my elementary years. I didn't have liquid in it, nor did I suck the nipple; I just held it when I went to sleep. I liked how the bottle felt cold; I used to flip my pillow for the same reason, to feel the cold side.
That upstairs bedroom was also where I used to climb or hop over my stuffed animals to get into bed. Then I'd lie real still because I was afraid if I moved a trap latch would release the swords that would come up through the mattress and stab me in the back.
One morning, in third or fourth grade, I awoke in that small upstairs bedroom and my body ached inside and out. The pain was such that I could barely move; it scared me. I landed in the hospital for about a week. I was told I had chicken pox under my skin.
When the new family room was built, Mom and Dad also had another bathroom built giving us two bathrooms in the house. The new bathroom even had a shower. Still, I didn't like taking showers until my late teens. To this day, at fifty years old, I still like to take baths. I sometimes night dream about exotic bath tubs and giant whirlpools and indoor pools with skylights.
Their were no heating ducts upstairs. Instead a separate gas space heater was in the small hallway. I used to like to hear the click it made when it would come on, after which I could hear what sounded like a flame burning as it radiated warmth. There was also a vent, in the big bedroom floor, that looked downstairs into the foyer. It wasn't a large vent, only about eight inches square. When I used to share that room with my brother, before I moved into the small bedroom, the head of mine and my brother's beds were on either side of the vent; I in one bed and my brother in the other.
One Christmas I heard Santa's bells downstairs. I looked through the vent but didn't see anyone. I woke my brother to let him know. He didn't seem too excited about it. My doubt nudged at me again, that Santa wasn't real. I wanted to believe, but part of me said it just couldn't be. How could a big fat person come down a chimney? I figured the bells were my father pretending. I could play along with that.
But the reindeer, the reindeer. I believed in them more than I believed in Santa. I really wanted reindeer to be able to fly.
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Click here to view the memoir index: Journey through Memoir (an index).
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